Unmanned Industrial Vehicle Firm VisionNav Robotics Bags Several Hundred Million Yuan with ByteDance as Investor
VisionNav Robotics, a vision guided vehicle provider for warehouse and factory operations, announced on Thursday the completion of a C-round of equity financing worth several hundred million yuan, with investors including ByteDance, Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group, Shunwei Capital, Unicom CICC, IDG Capital and Eastern Bell Capital.
The company says that this round of financing will be used to continuously invest in the R&D of products, improve delivery and global large-scale application layout, including expanding its products team and launching a number of new unmanned forklift products. Based on the existing market foundation, it will comprehensively promote the markets of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and Europe, as well as expand the operations support network. At the same time, it will cooperate with upstream and downstream high-quality suppliers and channel providers to grow together with partners.
Founded in 2016, VisionNav Robotics focuses on developing industrial vehicles with vehicle-level unmanned driving technology, and provides enterprises with flexible logistics solutions with industrial unmanned vehicles.
At present, nearly 150 projects have been delivered by the company, covering various difficult scenarios across many industries.
According to data by the Chinese Industrial Truck Institution in 2021, about 810,000 industrial vehicles of various types were added to the Chinese market in 2020, with the possession exceeding 3 million units. However, according to industry research firm Gaogong Industry Institute, the sales volume of domestic industrial unmanned vehicles was 3,500 units in 2020, an increase of more than 50% compared with 2019. The market for unmanned industrial vehicles is still a wide blue ocean.
